


tree museum

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Bittersweet, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-12-10 06:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11685849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: “Uh huh.” Phichit runs gentle fingers through Yuuri’s hair. “You’re already good enough. You’re amazing. You’re my favorite.”Yuuri cries harder.





	tree museum

**Author's Note:**

> title from ["big yellow taxi"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvtJPs8IDgU) by counting crows (cover).
> 
> warnings for anxiety and a quick hint at body-image issues.

“Hey, Yuuri. Hey, hey.” Phichit jingles his keys at the door like Yuuri’s a dog.

Yuuri, pulling his pillow over his head, does his very best to shut out his roommate. “Phichit, please, I’m not in the mood,” he mumbles. He took a bad fall today in practice and then another. His body aches, but with the rink crowded with casual skaters-for-the-day curious about the professional skaters who practiced here, all those people who saw all of it, his pride’s twinging harder.

Sometimes he just feels like it’s all for nothing. He works hard, harder than anybody, and he still feels clunky on the ice, can’t stick tricky jumps. Even if he’s only working to better himself, not measuring himself up against his competitors--and how can he not? That’s the point of _competitive skating_ \--he questions what that best version of himself would even look like. If he would be worth anything then.

If Phichit comes in any closer, he’ll see the mask of dried tears and deep hollows Yuuri eyed in the mirror when he last stumbled to the bathroom.

“Come on, Yuuri.” Phichit crossed the room over to him and draped himself along his back. Arms winding under Yuuri, he gave him a companionable squeeze. “I wanna go to the park, and I don’t wanna go alone.”

If Phichit hugs him--oh _no._ With his friend’s arms around him, Yuuri can’t help the wet sob that wracks his body.

“Okay,” Phichit soothes. “All right. Let it out, Yuuri.” 

“I just feel like I’ll never be good enough,” Yuuri moans into the pillow, tears running into the cloth.

“Uh huh.” Phichit runs gentle fingers through Yuuri’s hair. “You’re already good enough. You’re amazing. You’re my favorite.”

Yuuri cries harder.

“Done now?” Phichit sits up on his back, making Yuuri grunt into the pillows. “I’m going to take that as a yes. So if I get up now, you’ll go shower, right?”

Yuuri’s answer might be in human language.

“Ready to go now?” Phichit at the door, twirling his keys around his finger.

“Not ready like _you.”_ Yuri’s in some crappy shorts and a passable t-shirt. 

Phichit, on the other hand, has the cutest jean shorts belted around his hips and a tiny tank top that shows he’s never been able to retain an inch of anything but slenderness and leanness on his body, ever. “What are you talking about? We look awesome. Let’s go play on the monkey bars.”

So that’s--pretty much that.

Hands braced on the plastic sides of the slide, Yuuri leans back to look at Phichit who, indeed, is winging his way across the monkey bars, legs bent up so they don’t brush the ground. Actually, he’s surprised at how high up these bars are. If he was a kid, he would have probably been scared of taking a tumble off of these and breaking his face. Considering how rickety these play structures are, he’s not discounting the possibility wholesale just yet. “I don’t understand how you find places like this.” 

“I was wandering around, took the wrong bus one day. This place is like, ultra-abandoned, isn’t it? Spooky?” Landing lightly on the rubbery platform, Phichit bows to an imaginary crowd. “This is the kind of place that makes you believe in all kinds of weird stuff, you know?”

“What kind of weird stuff?” Yuuri’s skeptical. He can be superstitious sometimes, but he thinks that’s as much of a function of his anxiety than any real belief he holds in his non-anxious brain (which, what is that like, anyway. Never mind, maybe he is superstitious). 

“Aliens,” Phichit tells him, unblinking.

“A creepy playground makes you believe in em>aliens?” Yuuri’s not following. At the same time, with cloud-pearly late afternoon hanging over them, closer to dark than not, he’s grateful Phichit didn’t name anything actually scary.

“Yuuri,” Phichit answers with utter solemnity, “ _anything_ could make me believe in aliens.”

Yuuri can’t help but chuckle as he edges off the end of the slide and scurries up the ladder to sit at the top of it again. “You want the slide after me?”

“So generous.” Plopping himself behind Yuuri, Phichit winds warm arms around Yuuri’s chest. “Let’s go down together.”

Okay, lack of personal space, that is, should be perfectly fine with Yuuri. Every time he gives a sign of stiffening up, Phichit pulls back from him right away, so he lets himself relax into it after a moment and nods. “Push us off?”

“Yeah!” Phichit seizes the molded plastic at the top of the slide and shunts them forward with his hips. They fly down an inch and then on the turn, get jammed. Turns out that this slide wasn’t built for two full-grown men. With a cheerful _oops,_ Phichit disentangles himself and leaps over the side of the slide. 

Yuuri scoots his butt down the rest of the way, and though he feels ridiculous, takes Phichit’s hand to get down off the slide. “Um, thanks.”

Phichit just bows again, and Yuuri laughs, chest no longer so heavy with crying. Sauntering over, Phichit grabs one of the higher-up bars and swings back and forth on it, hair flopping over his forehead.

Arms crossed over his chest, Yuuri watches him. “Thank you,” he says eventually, “for dragging me outside. I needed that.” His lips tremble and smartly, seal before he can say, _”I needed you.”_

In a feat of flexibility that actually shouldn’t wow him--Phichit could do a Bielmann in his early teens, after all, he’s seen the videos--Phichit flips himself around the bar until he’s hanging off of it by the backs of his knees, rocking forward and backward. Upside down, he beams at Yuuri, like everything he’s done for him is nothing, really, nothing at all. “I’m really happy you came, Yuuri,” Phichit breathes through lips that are plump, parted.

Everything seems to slow for a second as Yuuri thinks and thinks about how they keep touching each other, cooking for each other, falling asleep in the same bed, and how carefully Phichit cups his heart. Then the world whirls into a roundabout around him as Yuuri kisses Phichit’s forgiving mouth.

 

Phichit’s hand grooves out the car window. He’s nodding along to some CD of his. While Phichit has indoctrinated Yuuri into some of his favorites, a lot of his music still escapes him. “You all good, Yuuri?”

“I’m fine.” Yuuri unpastes his cheek from his window and looks over at him. “Uh, what about you, are you okay?” Maybe it’s presumptuous that Phichit wouldn’t be, two days before Yuuri’s flying back to Hasetsu, but maybe it’s the right assumption. Yuuri’s sweaty hand twists in his shirt.

“I will be, I think,” Phichit says with a small, devastating laugh. “I miss you already.”

Yuuri swallows, silenced. Reaching over, he presses his hand to Phichit’s shoulder, the shape of it so familiar under his hands, from crying on it, from kissing it. He can’t, he can’t think of what to say. It won’t be forever, he wants to tell him, but how can he gauge how permanent their separation will be? While they can Skype every day, there are only so many promises one can make to someone who lives across the ocean.

Parking, Phichit slides out of the car first, while Yuuri takes a second to himself.

In the two years they’ve been coming here, the dilapidated playground has further deterioriated. Weedy flowers punch their way up through the strip of asphalt in front of it, and stain creeps across the biggest structure in the middle.

“Do you still believe in aliens?” Yuuri calls across the park to Phichit, who’s leaping inappropriately across every structure in the park.

Phichit, holding a handstand, says, “I’ll believe in anything,” and when Yuuri obviously stifles a laugh, insists, “Aliens built that slide, Yuuri!”

They’ve been here an hour. Woodchips stuffed in his fist, Yuuri feeds them one by one to the rocking dinosaur that Phichit sits astride.

Phichit pats its multicolored flank. “Thanks for always feeding my trusty steed, stable-boy Katsuki.”

“Of course, Sir Chulanont.” This time, Yuuri bows. Their roles in Phichit’s elaborate fantasy life, Yuuri has found, can be rather fluid. Over the years, he’s learned to catch up, if not quite keep up.

Dismounting, Phichit gestures over to the roundabout. “You get on, I’ll push first.”

“This is just so you can make me push you for ages without feeling guilty about it, right?” Nevertheless, Yuuri hops on, hanging onto the handle in the middle of it.

 _”Actually,_ it’s because you’re definitely not gonna jump onto it while it’s spinning, so there’s no other way we can both ride it together.” Phichit smiles. Yuuri would be too chicken to do it, is what Phichit is saying, just awfully nicely, and he has a point. Phichit extends a palm, and once Yuuri passes them over, folds them up and places them safely on the picnic bench, making sure that Yuuri can see just where they are. Then, hand planted on the flat surface of the roundabout, he begins to run its circumference, running it around and around.

He worries _hard._ Weirdly, not being able to see what’s really going on calms him somewhat. The speed of the roundabout blends Phichit into a blur as he lets it go and then backs up for a running start.

Phichit thumps onto the roundabout, and Yuuri screams slightly or a lot, don’t quote him on that one. But Phichit is just fine, hanging onto the handle, hands between Yuuri’s. And they spin fast, so fast, and it’s so much fun that he never wants the roundabout to stop and his thinking to start back up again.

“Phichit-kun, did I ever thank you for showing me this place?” Yuuri murmurs when the roundabout slows enough that he wouldn’t be whispering into the wind. Lifting his sweaty hands off the bar, he wraps them around the backs of Phichit’s hands that he knows as well as his own, knuckles mountains he could traverse in his dreams.

“You don’t have to, unless I have to thank you for every time you came out here with me.” Phichit lifts his hands and tucks Yuuri’s flyaway hand behind his ears, and on instinct, Yuuri closes his eyes. 

Yuuri trusts him. He trusts him more than he trusts anyone, including himself, and he wonders in a hundred years if he could ever find anybody like this again. No: he’s not in love with him. What he has with Phichit will last past that. 

When he opens his eyes, he sees that Phichit’s lips are glossy and soft, as sweet for kissing as ever. 

“You wanna go stuff our faces with noodles?” Phichit suggests, a wistful curve to his lips.

 _”Yes,”_ Yuuri says fervently. And no matter how hard his heart beats its fists on his ribcage, he does not kiss those lips because where that warmth lingers is already at his back, out of reach.


End file.
